Dear Martin, dear list,
thanks for the enlighting comments! I must admit that I'm probably a
bit too pedantic, and you're truly pragmatic, which is probably a
good idea :-) You're absolutely right that I could probably have
saved some time this weekend for more interesting stuff if I had
ditched /sw and reinstalled from scratch...
However, I finally did manage to update my stuff. Key was to manually
edit /sw/etc/apt/sources.list and roll in the 10.4-transitional, then
run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. As far as I can tell, the
whole fink selfupdate and postinstall.pl stuff is superfluous. [1] I
admit that the whole procedure was painful, but the small advantage I
gained was that I didn't have to manually reselect all the packages I
had installed. Also, now I know what to do when 10.5 comes along...
However, it would be great if the community of binary fink users
would at least benefit a bit from this experience I had. In fact,
everyone I know uses the binary distro, because in conjunction with
Fink Commander it is pretty accessible even if you're not a serious
UNIX hacker. Hence, I would doubt that this group of users is a
marginal one. They probably just speak out less loud. Also, I should
mention that the binary distribution is still the default if you
download the release dmg and don't tweak the settings.
It is of course sad if the point releases don't get much testing any
more, even though I would assume that many people use it. But that
cannot be fixed any more. What could be fixed, however, is the
website, which is still hugely misleading. It suggests that there is
an easy way to upgrade where there's none. Plus the instructions
appear to make implicit assumptions about a source distro being
available. How about fixing the website with easy instructions (that
doesn't only affect the news item on the main page, but also the
upgrade page http://fink.sourceforge.net/download/upgrade.php:
1) if you have a binary distro:
either be blunt and tell the users to ditch /sw, or line out a
suitable workaround that probably involves something along the lines
of what I pointed out above
2) if you have a source distro:
correct strategy involving probably fink selfupdate, postinstall.pl,
etc., in the correct order.
Right now, the news item is completely confusing and unstructured,
and http://fink.sourceforge.net/download/upgrade.php is structured,
but doesn't work and contradicts the news item.
If the website was fixed, I guess it could contribute a much to a
better user experience for a lot of people who aren't serious UNIX
hackers [2].
Cheers and thanks for the support on this list,
Moritz
[1] If I run postinstall.pl (which should now be from 0.8.0) anyway, it says
Checking system... powerpc-apple-darwin8.2.0
This system was not released at the time this Fink release was made.
Prerelease versions of Mac OS X might
work with Fink, but there are no guarantees.
which is probably another bug... It should know about darwin 8.2.
[2] In fact I'd say that I probably am a somewhat regular UNIX
hacker, but just imagine the confusion this whole thing would have
caused for somebody who is merely able to copy commands from a
website to the Terminal...
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